“Ancient” stars shine on

Stars on the ceiling of a Nova Scotia church were placed there with something more than artistic license.
By | Published: October 19, 2004 | Last updated on May 18, 2023

Stars on the ceiling
The newly restored ceiling of St. John’s Anglican Church in Lunenburg, Nova Scotia, shows the stars as they would have appeared from that location at the time of Christ’s birth.
Margaret Coolen
October 19, 2004
When workers at St. John’s Anglican Church in Lunenburg, Nova Scotia, began repairing the historic building, they faced a dilemma. Photographs showed the church’s ceiling, which was badly damaged in a 2001 fire, used to be decorated with hundreds of painted stars. But was it a random pattern, or was it an accurate portrayal of the night sky?

That’s when astronomer David Turner was called in. As he examined old black-and-white photos of the church’s interior, he saw patterns that seemed familiar — and yet somehow not quite right. “I love a mystery as much as the next guy, and this was certainly a mystery,” Turner says.

Turner presents St. Johns constellation findings
Astronomer David Turner described his analysis of the church ceiling at a meeting meeting of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada on October 15.
David Lane
Turner, who teaches at St. Mary’s University in Halifax, used to do planetarium shows. So he used desktop planetarium software to see where — and when — he would have to be in order to see the stars as they appeared on the church ceiling. “This was a planetarium director’s dream come true,” he says of the challenge.

The ceiling star patterns, located above the chapel at the east end of the church, showed only a portion of the sky. The most obvious constellation was Perseus, but it was placed high in the east, a location it can never occupy today. From Nova Scotia, Perseus is nearly “circumpolar,” which means it lies near the North Celestial Pole. Perseus skims the northeastern and northwestern horizons rather than completely rising or setting.

Polaris lies near the North Celestial Pole, so all other celestial objects appear to revolve around it. But because of a phenomenon known as precession of the equinoxes, Polaris hasn’t always had this privileged place. Precession causes the North Celestial Pole to move. Much as a spinning top slowly shifts the direction of its spin, the wobble of Earth’s spin axis causes the North Celestial Pole to trace a path across the sky.

If we turn back the calendar far enough, Turner explains, Perseus would have been circling a different spot on the celestial sphere and would have arced differently through the sky — differently enough, he argues, that it would have been visible high in the eastern sky, as depicted on the church ceiling.

St. John's Anglican Church
St. John’s Anglican Church was recently named one of the world’s 100 most-endangered sites by the non-profit group World Monuments Watch.
Nova Scotia Archives
After trying a few different scenarios, Turner discovered the ceiling pattern matched the night sky as seen about 2,000 years ago. Most likely, he surmises, the original artists wanted to show how the night sky would have appeared at the time traditionally associated with the birth of Jesus. Turner first checked how the sky would have appeared as seen from Bethlehem, but the orientation wasn’t quite correct. Setting the location for Lunenburg, however, gave a match.

The church ceiling, he concludes, shows how the sky would have appeared at sunset to a viewer at the latitude of Lunenburg who was facing east on December 24 — Christmas Eve — two millennia ago.

The wooden church was built in 1753, but historians believe the ceiling was painted around 1900. Although Turner used modern computer software, he says the people who painted the stars in the first place could have worked out the patterns using low-tech methods. Precession has been understood for thousands of years, Turner says, and the artists would have had easy access to accurate star charts. Working out the relative positions of the constellations with respect to the horizon, he says, would have been fairly simple.

Turner gave the star patterns to the artists restoring the church. After painting the ceiling boards a deep blue, they painstakingly added the stars in gold leaf. “It’s spectacular now,” Turner says. The star-studded ceiling is “the first thing you notice when you walk into the church.”

Originally from Nova Scotia, science journalist Dan Falk is now based in Toronto.

Originally from Nova Scotia, science journalist Dan Falk is now based in Toronto.